Do they have wet n wild brand in the UK? In America, wet n wild is the absolute cheapest makeup you can get at the drugstore—the sticky glitter you buy for costume parties, or because you are 14. “Wet & Wild” is also one of the deliriously cheap thrills on British pop singer Rose Gray’s debut, Louder, Please, a record with infernally catchy dance-pop hooks and the nutritional value of cotton candy.
Louder, Please is billed as Gray’s debut, assuming you overlook 2021’s Dancing, Drinking, Talking, Thinking, a seven-track independent release that proposed her as a sort of jazzed-up Adele you could play on your way to the party without fear of getting irretrievably deep in your feelings. Not long after, Gray dropped the lounge-pop vocal stylings, turned up the beat, and transformed into a name-brand house diva pumping out glittery synth tracks with names like “Ecstasy,” “Synchronicity,” and “Sun Comes Up.” The Louder, Please credits are stacked with hitmakers with a flair for stylish, fast-living party bops; Gray’s collaborators have worked with Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, Kim Petras, and more artists of a similar stripe.
Compared to Gray’s earlier singles, Louder, Please trends toward a slightly darker, seedier strain of club pop, flirting with 2020s electroclash revival. First-wave icon Uffie even picks up a writing credit on the charmingly Aqua-tic “Just Two.” Enter the party clichés: nose drugs, Bianca Jagger on a white horse, a YOLO anthem that goes, “We won’t save any lives tonight/What a time to be alive.” Imagine: What if Sabrina Carpenter were 30 percent more techno? What if OG QT walked out of cyro-storage and into a Chill Dance Hits playlist? What if Kylie Minogue but, you know, the Dare? Hey, what if we got out of here?
You need a certain mindset—possibly a certain blood alcohol content—to appreciate this properly. You can’t, for example, step out of a screening of the new Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and expect to acclimate to Gray’s sorbet vodka shooters while in a Nobel Prize-winning-songwriter state of mind. Doesn’t work! Louder, Please is chock full of pointless delights, such as this lyric you’ll remember even if you are only half-listening: “Party people live and party people love/Party people give and party people fuck.” Party people fuck? I’ll bet they do! (Sega Bodega produced that one.)
